The Kunze Kode

An attempt at dissecting my musical taste

I don’t go to dinner parties, but if I did and someone asked me about my profession, I’d probably say I’m a music writer.

“Oh, interesting. What kind of music are you writing about?”

A fair follow-up question, but one that’s hard for me to answer.

Because I wouldn’t want to bore my conversational partner, I’d risk sounding very generic in my reply, like:

“Well, all kinds of music. Really, my taste is very broad.”

Which is not true of course. My taste is, in fact, very narrow. Not to sound like a snob, but I actually dislike most popular music.

What I like is a set of disparate artists and records across genres, styles and eras. It truly feels hard to pinpoint, even for myself.

Most music writers have one or multiple genres of expertise. They’re really into classical music and opera, or they mainly write about jazz and heavy metal. They might be electronic-leaning millennial poptimists who grew up on college rock and pop punk, or Soundcloud rap evangelists turned post-hyperpop aficionados.

These days, I’m trying my best to resist being labeled like that.

So what kind of music would be Kunze coded?

I admit that I generally prefer challenging over easily accessible music. It’s just my nature, I guess – I value unpredictability more than familiarity. I favor instrumental over vocal music, with some notable exceptions, which I’m going to return to later.

I am not too interested in the most popular records. Instead, I gravitate towards those records that might feel a little strange at first. They’re often dubbed with terms like experimental, alternative, or avant-garde. These are just words though, and they obscure what this music means to me. While I enjoy digging into the heady concepts behind many of these records, I have just as much fun listening to Ornette Coleman as someone else might have singing along to a Top 40 radio song.

In terms of genre, I don’t dislike any type of music out of principle. That being said, there are some areas which I haven’t yet explored and some which I am not very interested in exploring.

I don’t particularly care about top 40 pop, mainstream hip-hop, EDM, country, classic rock and heavy metal.

I’m definitely not a ‘poptimist’, so you won’t ever find me raving about Taylor Swift or Drake here. I do like forms of experimental pop music though.

There are some genres that I’ve been listening to for a very long time, and though they don’t necessarily have much to do with each other, I feel a deep connection to the underlying scenes and cultures.

Looking at the articles I published here over the last two and a half years, the cornerstones of the Kunze Kode become visible:

• Ambient and experimental electronic music has been my #1 listening genre for the past decade. That includes subsets such as vaporwave, IDM, clicks’n’cuts, Balearic beat, ambient techno or dub techno, as well as more academic stuff, which I guess would fall under electroacoustic composition, musique concrète or sound art.

• I’ve deeply loved jazz since my youth. I do sometimes write about the weirder ends of jazz history here – esoteric free jazz, deep ECM catalogue, loft jazz reissues, ambient jazz, stuff like that. That being said, I’m not too interested in what I call ‘trad jazz’ (not the old records, but contemporary music that skews ‘trad’).

• There’s also a bit of rock in my listening diet; again, not so much the traditional kind, but noise, improv and post-rock. I’m also interested in weird krautrock, industrial, goth and art rock from the 1970s and 1980s. I don’t particularly care for all those ‘iconic’ white male singer-songwriters from that era though.

• Regarding vocal music, there’s a contemporary lane of music I love that we might just call art pop – artists who craft sophisticated avant-pop songs with influences from jazz, folk, classical and experimental music, and whose music I view in the lineage of all-time faves like Kate Bush, Björk or Laurie Anderson.

• And then, there’s hip-hop. I’ve identified strongly with that culture for the longest time. I’ve almost exclusively reported on hip-hop for the first decade of my career. Yes, I was that Jansport backpack-wearing middle-class kid raving about the latest white label import 12-inches and illbient compilations. I’ve also stopped caring about mainstream rap long ago, but I’ll still passionately discuss the newest Backwoodz releases with fellow enthusiasts.

• Hip-hop taught me to keep digging and stay curious about all kinds of different music from around the world. Dissecting Madlib’s mixtapes or J Dilla’s productions, I discovered older obscure and rare records from West Africa and Brazil, from Southeast Asia and Scandinavia; from dark industrial to proto-punk, from deep dub to blissed-out boogie…

As you can see, the Kunze Kode is quite complex – to get a feeling for it, you will have to follow my writings here for a while. What I’ve noticed is that I gravitate to certain styles and moods with the seasons, but not in the way you’d normally think. I love listening to sun-drenched Balearic house in fall and to dark ambient at the height of summer.

Confused? Just subscribe and follow me along.